The disagreement between your mother and you gives me inexpressible
affliction. I hope I think you both more unhappy than you are. But I
beseech you let me know the particulars of the debate you call a very
pretty one. I am well acquainted with your dialect. When I am informed
of the whole, let your mother have been ever so severe upon me, I
shall be easier a great deal.--Faulty people should rather deplore the
occasion they have given for anger than resent it.
If I am to be obliged to any body in England for money, it shall be to
you. Your mother need not know of your kindness to me, you say--but she
must know it, if it be done, and if she challenge my beloved friend upon
it; for would you either falsify or prevaricate?--I wish your mother
could be made easy on this head--forgive me, my dear,--but I
know--Yet once she had a better opinion of me.--O my inconsiderate
rashness!--Excuse me once more, I pray you.--Pride, when it is native,
will shew itself sometimes in the midst of mortifications--but my
stomach is down already.
*****
I am unhappy that I cannot have my worthy Hannah. I am sorry for the
poor creature's illness as for my own disappointment by it. Come, my
dear Miss Howe, since you press me to be beholden to you: and would
think me proud if I absolutely refused your favour; pray be so good as
to send her two guineas in my name.
If I have nothing for it, as you say, but matrimony, it yields little
comfort, that his relations do not despise the fugitive, as persons of
their rank and quality-pride might be supposed to do, for having been a
fugitive.
But O my cruel, thrice cruel uncle! to suppose--but my heart checks my
pen, and will not let it proceed, on an intimation so extremely shocking
as that which he supposes!--Yet, if thus they have been persuaded, no
wonder if they are irreconcilable.
This is all my hard-hearted brother's doings!--His surmisings:--God
forgive him--prays his injured sister!